I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better. It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and you could also seed it with your own starting color(s). Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.
"I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
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Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#12Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#13Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#14I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better. It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and you could also seed it with your own starting color(s). Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.
Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#15This is an interesting tool, it fails at 16 colors. Which is surprising. (it may be the gamut of my display of course but I would think 16 would be within its abilities). That is probably the most number of distinct colors I've needed in a graph. Works nicely for numbers 10 and below.
Hmm...the linked page worked for me on several tries for 16, 20, and 22 colors, even restricting the luminance somewhat. I used the protovis categorical colors ( http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/docs/color.html , see at the bottom of the page) when I needed a 20-color map recently.
Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#16I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better. It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and you could also seed it with your own starting color(s). Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.
But, doing it this way can result in oversaturated colors that compete for attention.
Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#17I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better. It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and you could also seed it with your own starting color(s). Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.
I'm no color expert but I'm pretty sure color distance in RGB space is a pretty poor metric compared to other color models (at least some of them). Looking at an RGB color cube I see big splashes of near-identical colors while the entire spectrum of oranges is hard to even find.
Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#18Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#19Re: "I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, doing it this way can result in oversaturated colors that compete for attention.
Interesting point. Though, some of the colors in OPs preset examples seemed very similar, even with only 7 colors. For generating graphs, maximally distinct colors seems the primary goal, even if they compete for attention, perhaps because of it.